fala   Portugal   The Portuguese firm fala – set up in 2013 by Ahmen Belkhodja, Filipe Magalhães, and Ana Luisa Soares – built this transparent guesthouse-studio that takes up the entire width of a narrow garden. Connected to the property's main house by paths of woo

fala   Portugal   Despite the limited space of the site and the regulations, the project generates complex interior spaces that emerge from the peculiar intersections with the different levels. The white piece is covered with marble dots and lines, crowned by pink chi

fala   Portugal   Fifteen equal but different apartments inside a predefined volume; a variety of formal gestures, flying columns and double height spaces alter the rational distribution of the program. The three facades have different expressions...

fala   Portugal   Layers of lines and dots are vigorously wrapped around a narrow and tall urban building. A system of concrete columns crosses all levels, allowing for different spatial narratives but maintaining a physical coherence. Glass brick walls and doors defi

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   The block goes up on one of the most typical streets of Foz do Douro, a traditional quarter by the Douro’s estuary. The building is a freestanding volume housing three apartments with a communal terrace on the roof, a commercial space on ground floor

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   Located in the old harbor area of the city of Porto, the residential building takes up a narrow plot facing the Douro River estuary. The project explores the idea of stacking, conceptually superimposing three concrete boxes containing the apartments.

depA Architects   Portugal   The new pavilion of the Serralves Foundation, designed for audiovisual projections, is to be understood in spatial and geometric terms as an extension of the museum. Its volume is extracted from the main building and its material makeup is modified t

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   The four semi-detached houses, wrapped in white surfaces with straight lines, are interspersed with the single family houses flanking Avenida da Boavista on its path to the sea. Symmetrically distributed, each one of the houses closes up in the trans

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   Three isolated but articulated buildings contain the residence, workshop, and multipurpose hall of the house for the painter Armanda Passos, located on Gomes da Costa avenue in Porto. To counteract this fragmentation, a continuous gray granite plinth

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   Designed and partially built in the decade of the 1970s as part of the program of the organization known as SAAL (Servicio de Apoio Ambulatorio Local), the project’s objective is to provide housing for an established community on an adjacent site. Cr

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Portugal   Despite the attempts to escape the shoebox-shaped auditorium, experience shows that this type of concert hall offers the best acoustics. In this case, the design chosen reinterprets the type, redefining the relationship of the concert hall with the e

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   Located opposite the main axis of Avenida da Boavista and just a few meters from the Quinta da Avenida semi-detached housing complex – also by Souto de Moura –, this commercial and office building is conceived as a large plinth on which a series of i

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   Designed as a tribute to the work of the filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, the most famous and long-lived among Portuguese directors, the Casa do Cinema is a small reinforced concrete construction of two levels, resembling a film camera the two large len

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   With five lines and 68 stations, the Metro of Porto is a large and extremely complex infrastructure. Among the many tasks that setting up this vast network of 70 kilometers entailed, the architectural definition of the stations was an especially impo

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   Located between the Duero River and the Atlantic Ocean, the Porto neighborhood where this residential block goes up corresponds to the area where the city grew beyond the medieval walls throughout the 18th century. The urban fabric in this zone is de

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   Boavista Avenue is the longest straight urban stretch in Portugal. It is five kilometers long and connects Rem Koolhaas’s Casa da Música, in the city center, with the Atlantic Ocean, to the west. The Burgo complex of offices and retail spaces goes up

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   The building is located in the gardens of a neoclassical style house of the early 20th century in Porto. So as not to alter the historical identity of the precinct, the new structure occupies a perimeter position, replacing the enclosure wall with tw

ARX Portugal   Portugal   Destinado a albergar espacios de soporte a las funciones de recogida, análisis y descomposición de la sangre en tres componentes (plasma, plaquetas y glóbulos rojos) que se distribuyen entre industrias farmacéuticas y hospitales, el edificio se proye

Carlos Castanheira   Portugal   On the outskirts of Porto, on the banks of the Duero River, the absence of urban planning with the subsequent proliferation of disorderly constructions has left a chaotic context of scarce aesthetic value. However, the beauty of the river, the farawa

Cristina Guedes Francisco Vieira de Campos   Portugal   Desde el principio, este café situado en Cais da Estiva, a orillas del Duero, ha pretendido pasar desapercibido en el entorno de una ribera poblada de elementos efímeros, como las casetas de los comercios o los barcos varados el muelle. La fuerte car

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   Juan Miguel Hernández León Todo ejercicio de memoria supone una detención del tiempo. Como en la isla de Calipso, en la que Ulises suspende su itinerario aventurero para abandonarse al éxtasis amoroso e impide a Homero narrar los años transcurridos,

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   The extension of the school was carried out in stages, starting with the remodelling of the original building. Later Álvaro Siza built the so-called Carlos Ramos Pavilion to accommodate classrooms for the initial years of the course. This is a U-shap

Despite the inevitable brevity of her career, Maria Antónia Leite Siza (Porto, 1940-1973) produced more than 3.000 drawings and paintings. Crippled women, disfigured bodies and, in sum, victims of misery and circumstance, filled her work in an exerci

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Eduardo Souto de Moura   Mine was a normal childhood, in a conservative and religious family of northern Portugal – my family is from Braga. My uncles, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers were educated, they all studied Greek and Latin in Coimbra, or medicine and psychiatry

Michele Cannatà   Fatima Fernandes   El proyecto del metro ligero de Oporto ha establecido nuevos horizontes y nuevas posibilidades en los modos de intervención de la arquitectura contemporánea. Sin campañas publicitarias sensacionalistas, Eduardo Souto de Moura ha dado forma en pocos a

Nuno Grande   En octubre de 2003, Paulo Mendes da Rocha visitó entusiasmado la ‘osamenta’ en construcción de la Casa da Música, la nueva sala de conciertos que el holandés Rem Koolhaas ha proyectado para la densa y granítica ciudad de Oporto. Al final de un largo

Kenneth Frampton   Álvaro Siza’s work has always adhered to that delicate point of balance whereby, without renouncing a continued exploration of the linguistic references belonging to the architectural discipline, he easily adapts to the conditions imposed by the prog

Vittorio Gregotti   Álvaro Siza’s projects in their final presentations always reveal traces of the creative process that has generated them, over and above his painstaking work of depuration and synthesis. It is such complex network of practically invisible signs that

Laurent Beaudouin   Time and motion as elements of spatial perception; geometry as a way of revealing geography; urban schemes taken as natural landscapes; scale and repetition as indicators of a collective: these are the patent features of Álvaro Siza’s work. Laurent B

Rafael Moneo   ‘‘Architecture is not a pre-established language, nor does it establish a language,” Alvaro Siza Vieira once said. Why do l choose this statement to begin my commentary on his work? Because in my view it offers many keys to understanding Siza's archi